Category Archives: Dogs

Armadillo encounter

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I posted about seeing a young armadillo when walking the dogs last week. I mentioned that the armadillo showed no fear whatsoever, and I also mentioned that I doubted that Zeke would have much trouble piercing its armor. Well, we saw what I think is the same armadillo a couple of days ago. It was scrabbling around in the same place. I thought it was a good opportunity to get a photo where you could actually see the armadillo, so I pulled out my phone and tried to take a shot. I had to hold two leashes in one hand while I took the shot with the other hand. This is what I got.

The armadillo is just above and slightly to the right of Sam’s head. Immediately after I took this shot, Zeke lunged and clamped the armadillo in his jaws. With one hand holding my phone, I wasn’t able to restrain Zeke. He shook the armadillo violently, and I could hear some crunching. I shouted “NO!” as loud as I could. I figured dogs all over Texas Valley stopped whatever they were doing and looked around. Zeke is hard of hearing, but he heard me this time. He dropped the armadillo and it ran away down the slope as fast as I have seen one move.

I have no idea whether Zeke injured the armadillo. It might have suffered serious, even mortal wounds. I have not seen or heard it since this unfortunate (for the armadillo) event.

Here’s what one Web site says about armadillos:

About two million years age, a relative of the armadillo as large as a rhinoceros lived in South America. Smaller cousins lived as far north as Canada. All of these forms disappeared in the ice ages long before humans inhabited North America. At the start of the 20th century, the nine-banded armadillo was present in Texas. By the 1930s, they were in Louisiana and by 1954 they had crossed the Mississippi River heading east. In the 1950s, they were introduced into Florida and began heading north. Today, some maps (Georgia Wildlife Web: http://museum.nhm.uga.edu/gawildlife/ gaww.html) show them to be restricted to South Georgia but, in fact, they are present as far north as Athens and Rome, Georgia. They occur throughout the South from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas through Missouri, eastern Tennessee and into South Carolina. They are currently absent from North Carolina but are likely to continue to move northward along the coast and into the Piedmont. Because they do not tolerate cold temperatures (below about 36 degrees F), several studies suggest that farther northward migration into the Appalachian Mountains will be limited.

Armadillos are not my favorite animals. I don’t like to see them killed by our dogs, but I would just as soon they would go back home to Texas.

Scatter shots

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It’s been a while since I posted. Nothing much has been happening, but I took a few pictures.

The blackberries in the valley are ripe now, but up here on the mountain they’re running behind.

They are prettier when they’re still red, but taste much better when they’re ripe and plump. Unfortunately, even the black ones still lack a few days before they are completely ripe. I ate one, which was semi-OK. The dogs know exactly what’s going on and want in on the action. I gave one to each. They didn’t complain.

On one of our other walks I heard some scrabbling around in the weeds beside the road. I expected an armadillo, and was not disappointed. It was about half-grown. The dogs were extremely interested. I thought I had included the armadillo in this shot, but I can’t find it. They are well camouflaged.

I don’t know how hard an armadillo shell is, but it must be proof against whatever predators they had to face when they evolved because they seem fearless, even with two fairly large dogs and a human almost within grasp. I suspect Zeke wouldn’t have much trouble with the shell.

We have had a few fairly windy storms, although not what some other areas not far away have had. I have been finding limbs on the road, but I had not seen any downed trees until I saw this one.

I have taken a photo of this tree before. It was a large oak tree, huge in these parts. I imagine that it was in the yard of an old farmhouse. It’s hard to tell from this photo just how large this one was. Apparently it was old enough that the center had rotted. It seems to have split down the middle. It’s sad to see the end of this old grandmother tree.

The full moon passed a few days ago. I took some shots of it as it rose. This was just before it was full.

This was just after.

And now for another movie experiment. Open garage doors seem to be irresistible to hummingbirds. We have had quite a few fly in and not be able to find their way out again, both in this house and our old house up on the mountain. This one managed to find its way back outside.

I really like hummingbirds, but I am afraid they aren’t the brightest of all the birds. Another small bird has flown into the garage on at least two occasions lately. It flies around frantically but then sees the open garage door and escapes. The hummers can sometimes manage to see the huge opening to freedom, but often can’t. They seem to focus on the white ceiling, apparently thinking its’s open sky.

I am not sure this movie will play. It plays on my laptop, but when I try to preview this post, it seems to hang up. That might be because I have a slow connection tonight, or there might be something wrong with the movie. Let me know if it doesn’t play and I’ll try to load a different version.

A Sam scare

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Sam gave us a scare Friday night. Around 2 am I woke up to the sound of dog legs banging our bed frame. It was Zeke, who was fleeing his and Sam’s bed because Sam was in the throes of some kind of seizure.

After I managed to turn a light on, I saw Sam wallowing about halfway between lying on his side and lying on his back. He was arching his back one way and then the other. It wasn’t a rapid jerking, but a slow, metronome-like movement. I spoke to him but didn’t touch him for fear that he would bite. After about a minute, which seemed much longer than that, he slowly rolled into the Sphinx position, but he continued to sway. He swung his head in a wide arc back and forth. That went on for another long minute or so, gradually slowing to a bare shudder in his head.

At that point I was petting and comforting him. He was making a licking sound, like dogs do before they vomit. After a few minutes, he vomited up about half of his dinner. I was torn whether to take him to Rome’s new emergency vet clinic or wait until morning to take him to our vet. After he settled down, I decided to wait. He vomited up a foamy mess once more, then seemed OK, lying against the wall on his bed.

Saturday morning I took him to the vet. She said that my description of his behavior did not sound like a typical seizure, but that at this point we can really only wait to see whether it happens again. There is anti-seizure medication, but she said the goal of its use is to keep seizures to a maximum of one per month, so if he only has one per month, they don’t give the medication.

He seems perfectly normal now. He went for his usual two-mile walk and was as energetic as always. I suspect that it was not an epileptic seizure, but I really have no idea what it could have been.

The good news about Sam is that he made it to the vet and back without vomiting in the truck.

On the stray dog front, we learned that someone had picked up the gray pit bull mama dog I fed on Thursday. We hoped it was the same people who took her puppies, but it seems not to have been. Now we are hoping the puppies are weaned, and that the mama gets adopted.

All is quiet on the Sylvester front. He has not reappeared as of Saturday evening. I looked back at some earlier cat posts and found that he disappeared once before for several days, so we haven’t completely given up hope. But we have scoured the neighborhood and we have spoken to the people whose outdoor, stray cat Sylvester often visits, and no one knows anything.

Mollie’s feet were very sore on Friday. We called the vet, who said the antibiotics had not had time to work. She limped along on three feet all day. But on Saturday apparently the antibiotics kicked in; she started putting weight on her right front foot and seems close to normal. She’s due back at the vet’s in two weeks, but we are afraid she may be stuck inside for two months.

Aside from that, there was two additional pieces of good news. What we thought was another stray dog turned out to be a wanderer from down at the bottom of the mountain. His owners found him and took him home. And another dog that may or may not be a stray, but probably is, has taken up at a neighbor’s house. They say they will keep him unless someone comes to claim him.

So, as of now, there are no unaccounted-for stray dogs up on the mountain, one recovered seizing dog, and one missing cat. We’re hoping for a period of calm after this.

Clouds and things

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We are in the middle of a fairly long string of rainy days, interspersed with days that are merely clouds. Everything is pretty gray right now.

This image was from a few days ago, before the deluge.

I like this one because of the three segments of the image. There is the top area, which is very close to a mackerel sky. Then there is the lower area of dark clouds. Below that there is the reddish glow of sunrise with the stacks and cooling towers of the power plant in the distance.

I took this on another day.

It’s a nice shot to the east opposite the sunset, but that’s not why I took it. The reason I took it had disappeared towards the north by the time I got outside with my camera. But then I saw something else.

Here it is a little closer.

A formation of geese. There are only eight here. The other flock was much larger. It was their honking that alerted us to their presence.

This was some blue sky and white clouds that appeared unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon.

I took this right after I took the dogs out for their pre-dusk constitutional, without my camera, of course. It’s nice enough, but, again, the scene I really wanted had disappeared by the time I got back outside with my iPhone.

It’s going to be rainy for the rest of this week. That means the dogs get a short morning walk. That’s actually OK, because we’re having to reduce Zeke’s activities for a while anyway. He suffered some pretty bad back pain two weekends ago. He and I spent the night together in the living room, him walking constantly, and me lying on our sofa, hoping he would finally be able to settle down and sleep. He couldn’t. He would lie down for a few minutes, then get up, sometimes with a little whimper, and then he would stretch, and pace. We had already given him the medication our vet prescribed for this problem, but it always takes a full day before he gets any relief. It’s hard to watch him when he’s hurting like that.

I took him to the vet that morning but she didn’t have anything else to suggest. She said we just have to wait for the medication to get into his system. We give him previcox, which is an NSAID. It’s the second or third medication we have tried, and it doesn’t work any more quickly than the previous ones.

 

Our dog for a day

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Sometime around a month ago we started seeing a black dog on Fouche Gap Road. It seemed to be a German Shepherd, but it was hard to get a good look because the dog was so skittish. It was another abandoned dog, just the latest in a long line of abandoned dogs.

In the past we have taken these abandoned dogs in and found them new homes. This time we couldn’t because the dog would not come close enough to touch, much less take in. We saw him (or her) here and there around the mountain, often in front of a particular house, sometimes far down the road, and occasionally passing through our yard. It spent a lot of time at that particular house, so one day when I saw the owner outside as I walked Zeke and Sam, I asked him about the dog. It turns out they didn’t want it and were trying to get animal control to pick it up.

We expected the dog to disappear soon, but still we kept seeing it.

The dogs and I saw it fairly often in the yard of the house where it seemed to be staying. I always spoke to the dog, but it only stared. Usually it ran down the driveway barking at us after we passed. I didn’t take it seriously.

A couple of people spoke to me about it. They had tried to approach the dog without much success. As the weeks passed and the dog didn’t seem to be losing weight, I assumed the people in the house where it was staying had decided to keep it. I didn’t think they were being very responsible by letting it run loose, but, I thought, maybe they would bring it inside eventually.

I wanted to meet the dog. I thought that it might be a little more trusting since it saw me with our two dogs, but it never approached us.

I had given up on ever touching the dog until Monday. Monday afternoon Leah and I were outside when the dog came up the driveway. It was very wary, but obviously wanted to come closer — to Leah, not me. I sat down facing to the side and avoided looking at the dog. The dog carefully approached Leah until she could pet its head. After a minute or so, the dog was close enough to lick Leah’s face, and we decided to give it some food. I went in and brought out a bowl of Sam and Zeke’s food and put it down halfway down the drive. The dog stood in the woods and barked, showing some nice, white teeth. It sounded pretty aggressive, but it wasn’t. It was more like the line from the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor movie “Stir Crazy” as they walked into a jail holding cell filled with big, rough-looking criminals: “We bad, that’s right.” It was pure bluff.

But eventually the dog came up and started eating slowly. I sat down not looking at it, and it approached me. After a few minutes, it was licking my face.

And that was it. The dog, which was a female, came to me and Leah readily. She wriggled and pawed at us and licked our faces. It was obvious this dog had been looking for someone to save it.

Here she is with Leah.

She’s a beautiful dog, obviously with a lot of German Shepherd, but not full-blooded.

Her head looks the most like a Shepherd.

She disappeared Monday night, but by Tuesday afternoon was back in the driveway. I fed her again and let the dogs meet her. After a little meet-and-greet, she started running big laps into the road, up the driveway and into the woods. She had more energy than she knew what to do with. I let Sam off the leash and they chased each other around the front yard.

I had found a number for the people where she had been staying and found that they did not intend to keep her and were, in fact, not feeding her. They had called animal control multiple times but no one had ever come. So, we thought, she must be starving.

Leah and I both said we would love to have her. She looked to be settled in, hanging around the garage door when we went inside, and coming up to us excitedly when we went back out. But with two dogs and five cats, it was just impossible. So I posted on a local Facebook group, looking for her owner or someone who might want to adopt her. I seldom use Facebook, so I was surprised to find an earlier post where people from the area were talking about the dog. At least three other people had been feeding her, but no one had been able to get close enough to her to do anything.

Within a few minutes after my post, someone in the area said he wanted her as company for his current German Shepherd. We arranged to have him come up and meet the dog, and they seemed to hit it off. After a half an hour or so, we loaded her up (unwilling as she was) into his car and they drove off. Once in the car she seemed to be okay. I gave her a dog biscuit and she took it, which means she wasn’t too upset to eat. A little while later Tuesday afternoon he texted us a photo of the dog inside his house, eating with his other Shepherd.

All in all, it was about as good an outcome as anyone could have asked for. She went to a good home with a guy who seemed to be a good dog person. We couldn’t keep her, could we? How could anyone get attached to a dog within 24 hours of meeting it?

And so, you might ask, why am I feeling so rotten?

Added Wednesday night.

Well, no one asked, but I’ll go ahead and answer anyway. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was picturing us with this dog and thinking no one else could possibly provide the kind of home we could. But, of course, that’s not true. The new owner has texted us several photos of the dog in her new home, and Leah and I are feeling greatly relieved. In one short video clip, the dog is lying on the sofa next to the new owner (shot from the owner’s point of view). He scratches her head, and puts her head down and relaxes. In another she’s lying on her side on the floor, completely at ease. I think she’s going to be good there.